On Tuesday, France gave back three human skulls to Madagascar in a moving and important event. One of the skulls is thought to belong to King Toera, a Malagasy ruler who was killed by French troops during a massacre in 1897. This historic exchange is the first time that human remains have been returned since France established a groundbreaking law in 2023 to make it easier for people to return home.
During France’s brutal colonial takeover of the island, they took the skulls as war trophies. They also took the skulls of two other members of the Sakalava ethnic group. After King Toera was beheaded in 1897, his skull and hundreds of other human bones from Madagascar were put in the collections of Paris’s national history museum.
Rachida Dati, the French Culture Minister, said that the collection had a sad background. “These skulls came into the national collections in ways that clearly violated human dignity and in a time of colonial violence,” she said during the handover.
Volamiranty Donna Mara, Madagascar’s Minister of Culture, called the gesture “an immensely significant gesture” that starts “a new era of cooperation” between the two countries. The lack of these remains has caused deep national sadness for more than a hundred years. She stated, “Their absence has been an open wound in the heart of our island for more than a century, 128 years.”
A united scientific commission concluded that the skulls came from the Sakalava people, but it could only “presume” that one of them belonged to King Toera. This Sunday, the skulls will go back to the Indian Ocean island, where they will finally be buried and put to rest.
This act of restitution is part of a larger attempt by France to come to terms with its colonial past. This endeavor has picked up speed under President Emmanuel Macron. Macron said in April when he visited the Malagasy capital of Antananarivo that he wanted to ask for “forgiveness” for the “bloody and tragic” colonization of Madagascar, which became independent in 1960 after more than 60 years of French domination.
For a long time, the process of giving things back was slow and hard, and each item or set of remains needed its own law to be passed. The 2002 statute that returned the remains of “Hottentot Venus,” a South African lady who was shown in 19th-century Europe as a human curiosity, is a well-known example. France’s parliament passed a new law in 2023 to speed up the procedure of bringing back human remains.
The rule is very important because France has a lot of collections. For example, a third of the 30,000 specimens at the Musee de l’Homme are skulls and skeletons. The new law has already made other countries, like Australia and Argentina, ask for their own ancestral remains to be returned.
France is also working on a different law to make it easier to return cultural property that was stolen during the colonial era. In late July, a fresh version of this measure was introduced. If it passes, it will let France give back cultural items that were stolen, looted, coerced, or violently taken between 1815 and 1972. Dati, the Minister of Culture, said that she hoped this law will also be passed “quickly,” which would show that France is serious about dealing with its colonial past.